My most faithful reader reminded me last night that I have not posted here in a long time, and he’s right. I’m quite overdue, and I have much to say, so please forgive this if it is too long. This isn’t even the half of what I’ve been thinking about lately, so I’ll be sure to catch you all up on it later.

I’m not a good blogger: I write a lot every now and then rather than a little bit each day. I’m a musician – that seems to be a good excuse.

Since this is such a long post, I’ll give you a few headings so you can find your way. I’m nice like that.

The Philosophy of . . . Poker????

I know I’ve written before about a very close friend of mine who is nothing other than a poker fanatic. At least once a week, he visits a neighborhood haunt to drink beer, socialize, and do many, many rounds of Texas Hold-‘em, sometimes for hours. He is a mathematician, and finds the combination of luck and skill involved in poker irresistible. I don’t share in his raw excitement over poker, but I’ll occasionally watch televised tournaments with him at his house and attempt to dive into that world a little more.

I’ve not been quite able to latch onto poker in the same way that he has – I know I certainly don’t understand the subtleties of the game. Somehow I think the cards themselves seem too much like arithmetic – too concrete to hold my interest. I’m open-minded, but it just hasn’t done it for me . . . yet.

What makes my other friends love me (?) is my penchant for overanalysis and constant thinking about how things that are mundane may be receptacles for deep meaning. Of course, I’m not the kind of person that can just sit around a table, have fun, and play cards. It doesn’t work like that. Instead, I try to see poker as a springboard for thinking about things like risk, coincidence (luck), and strategy. I also think about poker’s worth as a social activity, and whether it’s able to significantly further the relationships and understanding of the participants.

Deep down, I'd bet anything that my friend finds poker irresistibly appealing on all of these levels. It's kind of a latent engagement with the deep experience of it, but for me, I have to wrestle with these kinds of things directly. Another way to say this is that “Poker is like life” . . . and then expand on it from there.

Unfortunately, I’m far better at pondering the deeper meaning of poker than I would probably ever be in actually playing it, and I know there’s nothing worse than trying to play cards with somebody that doesn’t know how to play cards, or who thinks too much while they’re trying to do it!

But a little over a week ago when my friend said that he was throwing one of his about once-a-month poker parties, I certainly was interested in going. Not, of course, to wax philosophical about card games, but to connect a little more with others who I wouldn’t meet in any of my meanderings along my usual pathways.

So, Saturday, October 7, the day of this poker party, turned out to be an auspicious occasion. It was a moment of sudden and profound awareness of how we people occupy wholly different worlds and think in wholly different ways from one another, even about the same sorts of activities.

I'm still sorting out exactly what my impressions were of what may have appeared on the outside as, at most, an unusual Saturday activity. For now, it might be best to reflect on the simple magic of this marvelous combination: the resonance of shared interest with the difference of approach in the context of shared moments.

Or, put another way, the friends you value the most are the ones who delight in your most cherished experiences and then shed new light on them, and it is a great blessing when those exhilarating moments of connection happen.

While theese moments of chemistry may be elusive, they certainly are profound – and unquestionably worth seeking out if one has not yet experienced them. This is truly fertile ground . . . one I hope to plant many seeds in over the coming months. Now, I think I have a better idea of the harvest I'm looking for.

A Lot Changes In Eight Years

On Sunday, October 8, I was quite taken aback to run into a college friend after walking into a bar. I recognized him immediately. He is one of those people I don’t think you can ever forget after you meet them. With wild, piercing eyes and a freaky, larger-than-life persona, he has become the model of the crazy musician.

Since I last saw him, probably eight years ago, my guess is that he had become less sane while I’d managed to glue my head back together. It was an odd change of events.

Now, you readers will probably guess quite correctly that, for me, this person was one of a handful of unfortunate examples of unrequited love in my life. While I’m long over that now, he was certainly far more than a simple crush for me back then in my early college days.

Being a Baptist college, and us both being fundamentalists, and him being straight, it’s no surprise that any feelings I had in my very youthful and very confused state wouldn’t be reciprocated. He’s long since apologized and I’d long since forgiven him for his earlier homophobia, but perhaps meeting in person was a good opportunity for at least a moment of healing and understanding.

If there is any lesson in this, besides begging the question of why straight men seem to like hanging out at gay karaoke so much, it has to be that people do not stay the same for very long. We are all people who are growing more into who we are called to be. We must not think that we can look at ourselves now and think we are frozen in time as the final version of ourselves.

A Canadian friend of mine, who I mentioned in my last post, told me about how he underwent a profound change in his life after finding an effective, sensible treatment for bipolar mood disorder. He told me he had become a wholly different person after undergoing the treatment, and that he was glad that he had. But he also said the person he was before, if he had known about the consequences of this treatment, would have chosen not to undertake it. Something of the very essence of who he was is found in his depression.

My therapist has encouraged me to be a person that learns to “dance” with my melancholia, and as I think about what her tip might mean for me, I have to say that I certainly wouldn’t be the introspective person I am without this experience.

Of course, that isn’t to say that sadness is a good thing, really. But perhaps it is beautiful instead.


What do “good” and “beautiful” really mean anyway?

I have two close friends who share in my love of thinking. My formerly bipolar friend is one of them. Being a former researcher in cognitive science, he and I spend much time talking about semantics.

In my last post, I discussed how my Canadian friend and I spend time talking about words like “dating”, “boyfriend”, and “relationship” and how there really isn’t a consensus at all on what these words mean. The truth is that people are both shapers and shaped by the language they use, and so some words for me are particularly thorny in certain contexts of time and circumstance.

One word that is thorny for he and I is the word “Christian”. His operational definition of that word is synonymous with intolerant and narrow-minded individuals who hold to (or at least give lip service to) a lot of absolute moral strictures. He’s been surprised at meeting someone like me who is a self-defined “Progressive Christian”, but he still gives me fits when he speaks pejoratively of people of my faith without stopping to acknowledge the diversity present in Christian thought.

Not all of us are fundamentalists, and even fundamentalists wouldn’t label themselves like that.

Harry Browne (God rest his soul), one of my strongest political and philosophical influences, wrote about the idea of labels and how people tend to live up (or down) to the labels you place on them. This is why I continue my frustrating habit of asking people what they mean when they say certain things. Of course, I’m not a deconstructionist type who thinks that words never really mean anything, and we can’t really ever say anything to each other.

Even our experiences of the holy can get bogged down in our desire to label them in one way or another. Many of us use the word “God” to refer to this, but there really can’t possibly be any kind of common definition for “God”, is there? There must be mutually accepted definitions for words before we can even begin to have a conversation about almost any topic.

Do people realize this in their communications? Is this part of the reason why we don’t get along with each other?

This makes me think a lot about President Bush and his use of the words “terrorist” and “freedom”. What the hell does he really mean by this anyway? We’ve seen the ugly truth that these words mean whatever he wants them to mean, and if you don’t agree with whatever the definition is at any given time . . . well, better keep looking over your shoulder.